A federal judge has rejected a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist formerly employed by the Yale School of Medicine, against the university. Lee, who said in 2018 that she traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief more than a dozen members of Congress on the deteriorating mental state of then-President Donald Trump, alleges that Yale had violated her freedom of speech by terminating her contract. In her lawsuit, Lee asserts that her firing is linked to tweets she sent in January 2020 in which she proposed that Trump fans and lawyer Alan Dershowitz were suffering from “shared psychosis.” “[Lee’s] vague assertion that some unspecified provision in the faculty handbook creates a right to ‘academic freedom’ is plainly insufficient to show that [the] defendant undertook a contractual commitment to guarantee plaintiff continued reappointment,” U.S. District Judge Sarah Merriam said in her ruling.
